2022 Leadership Award Recipient | Sabrina Williams

SABRINA WILLIAMS
FOUNDER, DIRECTOR, CEO
EXCELL ACADEMY FOR HIGHER LEARNING CHARTER SCHOOL

Sabrina’s “shared leadership” style has built a culture of trust, open communication, and a stronger commitment to the mission, vision, and values of Excell Academy for her staff, resulting in new opportunities for school leadership teams to share in decision making processes. She has helped develop teachers and non-teachers in various leadership roles while establishing shared core values that promote a “whatever it takes” mentality toward ensuring the success and well-being of Excell Academy’s students, families, and staff.

Sabrina has successfully managed Excell Academy’s school budget year after year, ensuring consistent fiscal health for school programming and operations, earning MDE’s finance award throughout the past 15 years. She is a key collaborator in building and nurturing Excell Academy’s relationship with their authorizer, and the school was designated as a “High Performing Charter” for the 2021-22 school year. Additionally, Excell Academy has earned Star Tribune’s title of a “Beating the Odds School” and has been named a “High Quality Charter School” by MDE for each of the past two years.

While leading Excell Academy through the pandemic, Sabrina and her leadership teams “collaborated with community partners to support [Excell Academy] students and families in a plethora of ways, including developing and hosting a ‘Community Heroes’ childcare and learning hub for students of essential workers and students who had challenges with distance learning,” ensuring that the various needs of Excell Academy’s students and families were met. In fact, Sabrina received a Full-Service Community Grant (FSCS) to further develop her school’s community engagement and allowing the school to develop a community school strategic plan, hire a Community Engagement Coordinator, and develop family engagement programming.